Ex Libris :: Suzanne Sutherland – When We Were Good

Stand in any busy hallway, whether it’s comprised of doctors or students or the recently bereaved, and you’re guaranteed to hear a word so many times its one syllable no longer makes sense. A word so overused and meaningless that it feels gaseous and light between your teeth because it constantly occupies space there. This word is “good.” But what truly entails being “good”? The clean and hollow euphoria of puritanical ethics? Or simply, to feel “good” within oneself? During teenage-hood, as the main character of Suzanne Sutherland’s excellent When We Were Good attests, it’s difficult to feel anything but “lying-in-my-room-alone-with-a-CD-on-good.”

Sutherland’s decidedly queer/feminist YA novel follows Katherine Boatman, a sixteen-year-old Torontonian grappling with depression in the wake of familial loss. A disillusioned Katherine parts through grief’s thick fog to find a mysterious straight edge punk named Marie and a place where lyrics are poetry, X’s on hands are religious iconography, and punk shows can shake one’s innermost being with spiritual fervor. The strictly punk soundtrack (think Jawbreaker, Sonic Youth, and Minor Threat references) Marie introduces is raw and visceral, mirroring the electricity of teenagehood’s first touches, heartbreaks, and unbridled rage.

When We Were Good doesn’t eschew teenage romance and bildungsroman narratives, but instead employs them through the lens of queerness and mental health, transforming them into something new and gleaming and important. With every mixtape exchanged Katherine’s relationship with Marie moves through mild fascination, to steadfast friendship, to love. Katherine finds that if to be “good” is to be at home, then home is not found between the words of any straight edge rulebook, but instead lies within the recesses of the identity she accepts herself. And it is here where Sutherland transfigures the classic Salinger “Who am I?” for a more timely and significant sentiment: “How can I figure out who I am and be okay if everyone is calling me a slut and a dyke?”